So, it looks like Obama has hit the ground running. In the first 48 hours he has released three executive orders: closing Gitmo in Cuba by the end of this year, using the Army Field Manual as guideline for fair and equitable treatment of detainees, and no tolerance for torture.

I think he's going to be a very good President. His approval is at 77%. That's pretty astronomical. A lot of the coverage is focusing on the fact that he's the first African American president, which is interesting and all, but I don't think it's relevant to the kind of president he's going to be. It's just one of the many traits that makes him who he is, and he is acting not as a black man or as a white man, but as representative of the most powerful nation in the world, and other people will be interacting with him in that capacity.

More Obama posts in the future, but now I'll be posting about Lily.

So the other day, I was sitting on the floor, playing with vast collection of multi-sided dice (you know, like normal people do) when Lily came up and said, "Whatcha doin', daddy?"

I said that I was looking at these dice, and that one was called a die and more than one were called dice. She pointed to the twelve-sided die, and said "What's that one called?" and I told it had twelve sides, so it was called a twelve-sider or a dodecahedron, which is an awesome word for a two-year-old. She's been reciting it all weekend in a little sing-song voice, "Doe-deck-a-hede-ron!"

I'd actually been familiar with the word since I was about 10. I saw it in an episode of Doctor Who ("Meglos", the one with the cactus Tom Baker) and I impressed the hell out of my math teacher later that year by knowing the word for a twelve-sided solid off the top of my head.

Later on, when building a line out of my dice, she paused to look up and say "You're the best daddy in the world," which I knew, of course, but it was nice to hear.

For a brief while , she was also saying, "You're a towel!", if somebody mentioned a towel or "You're a duck!" if somebody mentioned a duck.

I asked "Is that your new catch phrase?" and of course she replied,  "You're a cat-phase!"

Cross posted at: http://jugularjosh.livejournal.com/8387.html